Fulmens

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Thanks, I figured it was something simple that I was overlooking.

That will make my life a lot easier.

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Welcome to the game! Ask lots of questions; I for one love to see my own words.

I feel like I'm walking into a straightline...

What does it mean, to "Chicken yard"?

I think of nukes as a "remove one spawn" button. Thunderous Blast, I will admit, is relatively easy to overlook for a nuke. Doesn't mean "ineffective", just easy to overlook.

With Elec/Energy you can hit Conserve Power first and that one blue after nuking will last a lot longer.

Is nuking NECESSARY? Not usually. The situation you were in was a perfect example of when it is necessary. But fun, oh gawds yes... it's fun.

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I suggest something like a Electric Melee/Willpower for ease of play and good AoE damage (AoEs go through minions faster than single target does)

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I didn't love my Electric brute until level 33.

I have a Fire/Will that has been a lot of fun from pretty much level 1 to present (level 29, I think.)

I recommend an axe/will brute to a friend of mine and she loved, loved, loved it. That was what got her to 50.

Now that doesn't mean YOU will like it, but it was fun for me.

Note: All the villains I have tried seem to have a slow spot around level 16-21. You just have to fight through it.

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Which got me wondering: What determines if a mechanical mob explodes when it's defeated? Is it random?

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Depends on their last performance review.

Pretty much what Radionucleide said.

When you have a full set of powers anchored on some enemy, that enemy and everyone around them hit like blind kittens. For some reason they are also magically attractive to all players and will usually die in the next four seconds, returning the rest of the enemies to full effectiveness. I've killed MY OWN anchors. It is a mystery.

Healing is one small part of the service any given Defender provides. In other games, it's the first and only job of the designated healer. People come from other games and make assumptions; Defenders get tired of being judged by stupid standards and get snappy.

As for the 3/4 health problem: there are a lot of possible mechanisms, but they pretty much end up with "Don't get hit like that."

The "what pool to roll in" question: I'm going to try to give an objective answer, followed by opinions. Generally reptlbrain's advice is good.

OBJECTIVELY: the groups are 30-34 and 35-39. If you roll on the 35-39 you have a chance of the "stop at 35" recipes, while avoiding the tremendous number of lousy "stop at 30" recipes. For example, in the 30-34 roll you have a chance of getting the confuse triple that ends at 30, as well as a chance for the confuse triple that starts at 30. There are some good "Stop at 30" recipes but there are considerably fewer than the good "start at 30" recipes.

SUBJECTIVELY: I encourage people to roll randomly, early and often. I took a tiny self-selecting poll and "nobody on the forums" was interested in buying merit rolls below level 30; "don't care much" was slightly ahead of "prefer 33s" in the people who were interested in sub-50 recipes, but nobody else had any preferences. I bought a lot of rolls, and my preference was 35-39's from a level 32 to 35 character. Part of my reasoning is that a level 50 can create any "max level" recipe by rolling- including level 30 ones. Only a level 33 character can create a level 33 recipe by rolling merits. So you're "wasting your youth" by creating a level-capped recipe.

SIDE NOTE: I will buy your rolls for 6 million each- I give you the money, you roll the recipes and give them to me. I am effectively buying merits this way- it doesn't matter if you roll a Numina's unique or a Numina's End/Rech, I pay the same. I don't have enough data to know if my price is high, low or about right. . . I've only bought about ten rolls so far and none of them were big money.

(qr)
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They arent customized, they are standard mobs in standard proportions.

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Same is true for Comm Officers...

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Actually, the meows were using the [level 42] comm officers from the Sewer Trial, which were much higher XP than normal comm officers. Also, spawns of nothing but comm officers [when only one officer puts down the portal and the rest act like standard-to-weak minions] are hardly "Standard proportions".

Freaks are "standard" difficulty for, say, the 25-35 game. Nemesis, Malta, Carnies, Ruularuu are all harder and in the "good old days" that was what you got from level 40-50. Didn't use to have CoT/Council in newspaper missions.

... And we were struggling through them with only our vastly overpowered Issue 4 defenses to keep us alive.

Clearly y'all are looking for this.

Earlier in the thread, Lord_Of_Umbra said
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Always found the "after sets" arguement to make little sense. If that same blaster was not most survivable and DPS producing before sets and now is after sets.. what happens when ATs he was comparing to also slots purple sets?

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OK, let's take two imaginary sets.
One has five attacks that each produce 100 DPS, take one second and recharge in three seconds.

Adding massive recharge to that set does NOTHING to the DPS.

The other one has five attacks- four of them take one second, recharge in three seconds and do 100 DPS, the other one is a super-attack that takes two seconds, recharges in 21 seconds and does 500 DPS.

You could cycle the four normal attacks and throw in the super-attack whenever it's up. The DPS for the whole chain, like that, is about 120 DPS instead of the 100 DPS for the other chain.

If you got to 200% global recharge and 100% recharge in the superattack itself, you would be hitting with the superattack every 7 seconds, instead of every 21 seconds. Your DPS goes up to about 160.

There are superattacks in various sets- KO Blow in Superstrength comes to mind- which are huge, but slow to recharge; there are also attacks like Blaze, which are only "large" but are VERY fast (so huge DPS, but another way.)

If you make them three times as frequent, you end up with a great improvement in DPS.

All killer, no filler.

And if you're new to the market, and you're trying to move your life savings... bad time to have an obvious-after-the-fact learning experience.

Post deleted by Moderator 08

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probably have a look at the edits they have made on there builds, when other powersets have been nerfed like hell!

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Statesman was some sort of Invuln/SS tanker- and he took Invuln tankers down in strength by a factor of about THIRTY. Yes, they used to be 3000% as hard to kill as they are right now.

I don't think even the original Dreck map farming would get you to level 50 in 8 hours. (for the new folks, that was a level 50 "post apocalypse" map full of freaks. People ran it over and over- back then, you could herd the whole map and kill hundreds of guys with one Inferno. Now the mission it has a timer on it.) Freaks were much easier than any other level 50 guys available at the time- there were no level 50 Council or Thorns radio missions.

Of course, that was before they sped up the XP. Even then, Meow farming had some sort of, like, magic quintuple-XP badguys on it.

I suspect what we're seeing is modified Dreck farming, or maybe some sort of tighter map so they spawn closer. But I don't know.

I'm not a full-on expert with Drain Psyche yet, but my experience is this:

You don't need to slot for End Mod- for each person you hit, that's about a Speed Boost worth of extra endurance. HOWEVER this ridiculous, over-the-cap, can't-burn-it-fast-enough level of Endurance does make one Stupid Blaster Trick viable. If you slot for 95% End Mod, and you hit 6+ people, you can nuke and start getting endurance back immediately, because you will have more than 1000% End Recovery.

It's a hard thing to pull off, because mostly when I hit 6 or 7 people the nuke isn't up, and if the nuke's up than BU/Aim aren't up, and if everything's up I only hit 3 people with Drain Psyche. Or I hit 7 people and the spawn's half dead by the time I realize it.

But it's a total Personal Victory Point when I get it to work.

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You must use dam SOs in your attacks.

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This. You know how much damage you do with Build Up? When you put three SO's of damage in each attack, that's how much damage you do WITHOUT Build Up.

I think you're about to be very pleasantly surprised by what your Blaster can do.

I may have misspoken. Ice/ice has very good damage. I never meant to imply otherwise.

But it's easy to fall into the trap of "hold this guy, hold that guy, Shiver, Ice Storm, Ice Patch, oops gotta rehold that guy" and never get around to that actual damage.

I also found myself going "I have these REALLY GOOD things in my power tray that I just never get to because I have even better things to do instead."

It's a good "problem" to have.

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Calibrated Accuracy is just fine.

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... not unless they changed it since last time I looked.

*looks*

Nope, hasn't changed. Still gives, like, 45% damage buff for ALL SIX IOs. It's the only "booby trap" set I'm aware of that is designed for a damage power and doesn't come anywhere near the damage cap.

I know you've done a ton of reading, but there's a little more in my sig.

Basically: What heph said.

I have a half-life in melee combat of about four seconds.

Well, if you throw a couple hundred million into the inf-to-prestige grinder, you can get a small box with a storage container in it. Maybe even less money than that.

That kinetic combat is perfectly understandable [to me].
OLD KIN COMBAT BONUS FOR 4: +3.75% Smashing Defense

NEW KIN COMBAT BONUS FOR 4: +3.75% Smashing and Lethal Defense; +1.875% Melee Defense.

There are only 5 in the set, one is a semiworthless proc, and the D/E/R is the other, or maybe the only, "Pool C" (What do we call those these days?)

For some people, this is a "Slot three of these sets if you can" powerset, and it didn't used to be... so there's not a lot of old ones lying around on people's characters.

MS Pain. I like it.

The "Ways you see most frequently" to find groups work really badly, but are conspicuous. Broadcasting, for instance, is not very effective.

Setting your search tag to "looking for anything" helps sometimes.
Setting your search field to something useful ("rad/sonic. I make damage!", or "Throatcutter for justice", or whatever) helps sometimes.
Joining a global channel- I don't know the ones on Freedom very well, because a lot of them are full- helps a lot. You can say "Anyone want a level 32 broadsword scrapper" or whatever you are.
Someone's going to say "Form your own teams" and it might as well be me. If you do so, let people know what kind of team. "Small L32 team to do invincible Freakshow missions, interested?" is a good invite. "Join my team?", not quite as good. Blind invite... often blind rejected.

EDITED BECAUSE I LEFT OUT THE IMPORTANT ONE:
If you find a good player on a bad team [and you will get a lot of bad teams, even if you build them yourself] right click and "Friend" them. "Global friend" if you think of it, but don't take it personally if they turn you down. Gfriends can stalk you. It could happen.

Eventually you will have a network of people and you can ask "Whatcha doing?" and get an answer, maybe even a team. That doesn't help you NOW but it will help you SOON.

Smurphy had a prize up (100 million inf? I could be making that up) at one point for anyone who could do it, and he was willing to provide the funds.

Then he was willing to do it himself, with his money, according to your plan, and pay you if it worked.

I don't remember all the parameters he set for the challenge.

I believe there are some market bugs- many people report bugs which are just misunderstandings, but I think there are some real bugs.

Unfortunately they are hideously difficult to reproduce, hence difficult to fix.

Did you get a screenshot ? you need to have something set...

found it. "/Screenshotui 1"